John Lindal’s Blog

RedHat Enterprise Linux 4

December 20, 2005 on 4:12 pm | In Computers | No Comments

I finally upgraded my work computer to RHEL4. It’s nice to have Firefox, but overall, it was a pain.

The first thing I noticed was that Gnome silently overrides the settings in Xdefaults. So I tried using ~/.Xdefaults. After restarting X, Gnome kindly notified me that it was ignoring this file, too. A bit of Googling yielded the solution to create a script and install it as a Startup Program via Preferences → More Preferences → Sessions. Make sure the order is 50, so it executes after all the other Gnome stuff.

Next, I noticed that my computer was strangely silent. The sound test had succeeded during installation, but the command line was not beeping during command completion! A bit more Googling revealed that the pcspkr kernel module is not installed by default. How nice. More research revealed an RPM that claimed to patch rc.sysinit to do this. As if I’m going to trust somebody else to do that! It’s quite a long script, but finally I discovered that adding pcspkr to the other variable, which controls the list of miscellaneous kernel modules to load, solves the problem.

Now that I’m writing this, I’ve discovered that the left arrow key just doesn’t work in Firefox 1.0. When the caret is at the end of the line, left arrow jumps to somewhere near the beginning of the line. Lovely. The good news is that Firefox 1.5 is trivial to install and works just fine.

Of course, now that I’ve gotten this all to work, I’m going to switch to fvwm2 just as soon as I can grab a copy of my .fvwm2rc file from home. It’s very easy to install and eates a lot less memory:

1. Download the fvwm2 RPM from www.fvwm.org.
2. Downloadthe libstroke source from www.etla.net/libstroke/.
3. Install libstroke as root: ./configure; make; make install
4. Install the fvwm2 RPM with --nodeps
5. Edit etc/X11/xinit/Xclients to set PREFERRED=fvwm2
6. Edit /etc/sysconfig/desktop to be a blank value.

I suppose memory isn’t really a concern if you’re running with 1GB, but I only have 192MB, and I need all of it to link Code Crusader statically.